Epistemographer

Dan Froomkin offers the best concise read on the election that I’ve seen:

So maybe on Nov. 2, Americans won’t be voting for presidential candidates as much as for competing realities.

The best summary I’ve seen of yesterday’s political events:

Okay, students of the White House, what did we learn yesterday?

1) Senior administration officials can make remarks on a not-for-attribution basis to the press — but the White House can later decide to make the attribution public if it can help discredit said senior administration official-turned-whistle-blower.

2) When you’re a special assistant to the president, your job is to tell the press the truth — but only the parts that reflect well on the president.

3) When you’re the national security adviser, it’s really important for the public to understand your position so you give lots of interviews to the press — but you can’t answer questions under oath before a legislatively-chartered body because that would be a violation of the Constitution.

4) It’s not okay to suggest the president has credibility problems — unless you’re the president, and you’re at a black-tie correspondents dinner, and you’re being really, really funny.

If you’re not reading Dan Froomkin’s White House Briefing every morning, you really should be.

This is exciting – Dan Froomkin, my old boss from washingtonpost.com just started writing a daily media round-up column called White House Briefing. Dan’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met when it comes to the intersection of politics, journalism, and new media, and I can’t think of anyone better to tackle this sort of column (though I do wonder how this happened, since one would imagine that there’s a bit of overlap with Howard Kurtz’ Media Notes weblog-ish column).

A newspaper story:

Flags are still flying along the neat blocks of bungalows on the border of Cleveland and Euclid. Shops still carry signs urging all who pass to “support our troops.”

And for the moment, at least, George Bush seems to be a part of the patriotic tableau, an ominous sign for the Democrats. Even some who yearn for a stiff challenge to President Bush are hard put to name the Democrats who could provide it.

“He stood up for what I would have done,” said Michael Brewer, a 48-year-old technician in Euclid who did not vote for Mr. Bush in the last Presidential election. Cary Wayne, a 42-year-old executive recruiter, a Democrat who voted for both Ronald Reagan and Mr. Bush, said the President “made me very proud to be an American, not that I wasn’t before.”

…

Interviews with about 20 people in this working-class area found an edginess about the faltering economy, but also the expectation that Mr. Bush would now turn his attention to problems at hoe.

Richard Stegh, 33, who was laid off from his job at a fiberglass products factory, said he understood that the war “had to take a front burner.”

But Mr. Stegh, whose house was decorated with one of the larger flags in the neighborhood, said he hoped that now “things are stable enough in the Middle East that he can start in on unemployment and education.” And the father of two children — “I’m playing Mr. Mom,” he said, watching the children while his wife was at work — had nothing but praise for Mr. Bush.

…

The Democrats, Mrs. Barry said, seemed “passive.’

Mike Lynch, a 22-year-old employee of an appliance service shop, said of Mr. Bush: “I think he’s shown his ability to lead. Everything else, I really haven’t thought that much about.”

This is an area where many people are accustomed to voting Democratic in state and local races and Republican for the President. Tim Hagan, a Democrat who is a Cuyahoga County Commissioner, said, “These people are very, very patriotic and would rally to the flag and to the President.” The glow from the war, he said, “has not diminished dramatically.”

…

And many people here voiced the discontent with conditions on the the home front.

Ed Savol, a 40-year-old manager of a Sunoco service station who voted for Mr. Bush, said the allied success left a lot of good feelings here. But he was quick to respond when asked what Mr. Bush should be doing now.

“Take care of his own,” Mr. Savol said. “Take care of his own people. Come up with an educational program, a job program. Take care of the people here.”

This excerpt is from an April 4, 1991 New York Times article, following President George H.W. Bush’s wildly popular military success in the Persian Gulf (thanks, Lexis/Nexis!).

Saddam Hussein’s captured. This is an unqualified Good Thing. However, in no way whatsoever does this mean that George W. Bush is guaranteed four more years in office. Remember what happened twelve years ago, and pay attention to the rumblings as discontent with domestic politics begin once again to crowd in on the administration’s foreign policy successes.

David Brooks’ advice to Republicans for their NYC convention next fall:

This week I read that you have abandoned plans to house Republicans safely on a cruise ship off the island of Manhattan during the G.O.P. convention in New York this summer. Have you paused to consider what this will mean?

It will mean that instead of spending time in a secure environment offshore, kind, decent Republicans will be wandering innocently among packs of inflamed New York liberals. They’ll be subjected to long harangues that rely heavily on the words “multilateral,” “Kyoto” and “John Ashcroft.” They’ll get condescending looks when they go into a deli and order a strawberry and chocolate chip bagel with pineapple cream cheese – a perfectly acceptable bagel option in most suburbs. They will naively pick up The Village Voice, thinking it contains small-town news.

Great article on Joe Trippi (Howard Dean’s campaign manager) in The New Republic online. I won’t excerpt any here, but go read the article. It’s a great profile of a case where vision and ideas drove technology use, rather than the other way around…

So, many people are blogging this better than I have the time or knowledge to do, but if you’ve been in a cave today, Atrios was essentially served with a cease and desist letter by blogger Donald Luskin today.

Seems that this might not be about simply stifling criticism, a la Fox v. Franken, but something more insidious. Atrios blogs under a pseudonym, and has been very protective of his privacy. Luskin’s threatening to go to Blogspot to force them to reveal Atrios’ identity (not that that is necessarily even possible), possibly in the hopes of outing him.

All sorts of interesting issues are gonna get churned up here…

As a scholar who’s sensitive both to historiography and contemporary media criticism, I’m well aware that for the vast majority of the world, those who don’t get to go into archives or interview historical actors firsthand, history only exists in the telling. We labor to make our work transparent, extensively documenting our work in part so that others can follow in our tracks, check the same sources and confirm (or rebut) our conclusions. In the end, though, this kind of fact-checking is simply too much, so the audience for history places its trust in the storyteller, assuming that what is seen or read is true unless offered evidence to the contrary.

That’s why this is so damned disturbing. In essence, you’re seeing a reframing of the events of Sept. 11, 2001, through an extremely partisan lens, rewriting actual spoken dialogue and re-editing the sequence of events for dramatic effect.

Let me be blunt: This. Is. Not. History. That. Should. Be. Toyed. With.

Two quotes from the story, which you should really read in its entirety:

“This is the story of DC 9/11. Screenwriter and co-executive producer Lionel Chetwynd had access to top officials and staffers, including Bush, Fleischer, Card, Rove, and Donald Rumsfeld‚Äîall of whom are played by look-alike actors in the movie (as are Cheney, Rice, John Ashcroft, Karen Hughes, Colin Powell, George Tenet, and Paul Wolfowitz). The script was subsequently vetted by right-wing pundits Fred Barnes, Charles Krauthammer, and Morton Kondracke.”

“There are, of course, precedents. ‘One of the original aspects of Soviet cinema is its daring in depicting contemporary historical personages, even living figures,’ Andr√© Bazin dryly observed in his 1950 essay, The Myth of Stalin in the Soviet Cinema. It was one of the unique characteristics of Stalin-era Soviet movies that their infallible leader was regularly portrayed, by professional impersonators, as an all-wise demiurge in suitably grandiose historical dramas. So it is with DC 9/11, where documentary footage of the collapsing WTC is punctuated by the pronouncements of Bottoms’s Bush…That Bottoms is reconfiguring his role in the Comedy Central series That’s My Bush! (a gross-out sitcom canceled a month before 9-11) provides a uniquely American twist.”

The mix of documentary and fictionally re-enacted footage is a dangerous, dangerous combination, and I don’t believe that the viewing audience will on the whole be sophisticated enough to draw a distinction between the two (especially given the verite, news-footage look which the creators of this program appear to be going for).

How ironic is this: someone twisting the notion of social construction in the name of political gain, in the process unintentionally (or perhaps intentially) engaging in the very sort of social construction which he denounces. It’s either brilliant, or idiocy (I’m leaning toward the latter).

In this week’s New Yorker, there’s a letter to the editor that reads, in part:

“…After September 11, 2001, Bush told the American people that the terrorist attacks were the work of those who hated freedom and democracy. By also characterizing the Iraq conflict as a war in defense of those values, he drew a straight line between the two events, even though no known link between Iraq and the attacks has ever been demonstrated…”
– Daniel J. Hannerman

This is just one example of a trend in American political culture, the increasing use of the “fallacy of the undistributed middle.” In short, it goes like this:

A is related to C;
B is related to C;
Thus A is related to B.

In this case, C is the undistributed middle, the thing that seems to connect A and B. On first glance, this connection seems to make sense, but consider this example:

All trespassers are shot, and John was shot, therefore, John was a trespasser

The middle term, the thing that connects John to being a trespasser, is being shot. However, John might have been shot as part of a mugging, or because he committed suicide. Just because he was shot, you can’t assume that he was a trespasser. I could break out some Venn diagrams, but you get the idea.

So, what does this have to do with the New Yorker quote? Well, it seems that one of the strongest tactics in the political toolkit of the conservative movement these days is the ability to connect two seemingly unrelated concepts through a reified undistributed middle. “Reification”, a la Berger and Luckman, is the process by which knowledge gets separated from the process of its production, and seems to just exist sui generis.

In the case of the war in Iraq, by constructing an idea of “those who hate freedom and democracy” and reinforcing it in speeches, press briefings, and elsewhere, the Bush administration reified this idea of evildoing America-haters, creating a meme that could then be attached to any group or regime in its sights. Thus, by using this reified category as an undistributed middle, the administration was able to connect two essentially unrelated groups (al Quaeda and Iraq) in the minds of the public.

It’s not just “evildoers” – this same tactic has been very successfully deployed by the conservative movement in domestic politics. Consider the word “liberal.” Though I haven’t done any hard historical research on the subject, it seems to me that the connotation of the word “liberal” has been reshaped in the past fifteen years. In short, “liberal” has become reified, detached from any clear referent: in much of popular culture, “liberal” doesn’t stand for a particular set of policy stances, or even a larger philosophical orientation – instead, “liberal” just exists as an “other”, a demonized straw man to knock down with impunity.

You can credit Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich and the rest of the early-1990’s conservatives for this reification, in particular the institution of talk radio, which lends itself easily to this sort of idea-construction (remember Father Coughlin earlier this century): as a reader of Walter Ong might point out, radio is oral, which means that it tends to be circular and repetitive compared with print, which lends itself more easily to complex, linear arguments.

The point here is that by constructing and reifying the idea of a “liberal”, and attaching certain premises to it (“Liberals aren’t in touch with average Americans”, “Tax and Spend”, “Treason“), conservatives can infer that any politician is connected to all these premises just by invoking the “L”-word.

An interesting consequence seems to be that many liberals themselves are running scared from the label “liberal”, and are left without any good language to describe what they stand for (hence, the popular notion that Democrats have no platform). It’s not that Democrats have no platform, it’s that they have no safe language to use to express it, because the linguistic rug has been pulled from under their feet.

So here’s a question with which to end: why haven’t liberals fought back, turning “liberal” back into contested turf rather than just rolling over and trying to work with the political terrain as the conservatives have defined it?